What have we Learned?
We have published a summary to our investigation. However this being an examined academic exercise intended to be a practical learning experience, it seems appropriate to talk about what the group learned in the process of this exercise separate from our findings.
Top Three
1. Jean Rhys, the Outsider
Our project title and the aims of our analysis were not arbitrarily contrived. The fact is prior to this endeavor, as a group, we knew relatively little about Rhys. It would have been easy to choose something arbitrary to seek to prove in this study but when between us we analyzed the corpora of biographical work we were unanimous. The difficulty of biography and difficulty of Jean Rhys in particular was that she was an outsider. Massive variation between approaches in the various texts we analyzed were found to be reflective of the difficulty of portraying someone whose life was so shaped by otherness and alienation. The means of analysis we learned to use turned out to be more varied ways we could confirm this fact.
She is the outsider of society, whilst she lives through her fantasies and internal universe
-Belinda Sarstedt in her AntConc Analysis
2. Digital 
Humanities, Double Edged Sword
There is no disguising the fact this endeavor has been explicitly a learning experience in the use and utility of the digital humanities. We are now even more so than prior to this project convinced of this. However the digital humanities utility is bounded by the very hard limitations of the physical, the literally physical. Many of the biographies we examined were not available to easily be digitally analyzed because digitized versions of the text didn’t exist. Even the Google Books scanned entries for some of the more obscure texts were inaccessible. The duality of digital humanities in this way is an incredibly important revelation, since many of us are now convinced that the march of progress is in their direction and that they are the way forward. We have learned that we must be ever vigilant to not accidentally lose or leave anything behind as the technological revolution in the humanities washes over us.
There’s a sort of implicit expectation that tools like text concordancers are tools by which we make broad judgments and generalizations […] In reality, they are just as useful if not more in literary criticism for teasing out very minute, very precise details
-Anthony Friel in his AntConc Analysis
3. The Difficulty of Biography
In our analysis of the role of Jean Rhys’ status as an outsider and her societal otherness in her life, and in the work of people writing about her life we learn something about biographies themselves. Having read and analyzed a comparative sample of biographies for this endeavor we learn something about the nature and difficulty of and differences between biography both in general and of Jean Rhys. More now than ever in the context of this project we appreciate that biography is very much more an art than a science, there are competing ideas about how we should or if we can write about the lives of people like Jean Rhys fairly or at all. Some of these are competing notions of effective methodologies, some are competing notions of what a biography should be.
Biographers are charged with a difficult task. There are many ways to tell a story. Certain truths remain no matter what, but even the accounts of a true life differ greatly in perspective and intention.
-Jack Howard in The Overview
Everything Else
4. It Takes a Village to Write a Novel
In studying the biographies of Jean Rhys her name is not the only constant. Much like all people her life was impacted by the people she shared it with, that cared for her, or didn’t as the case may be. We learn in the study of her life as a writer that the people in her life contributed as much to the existence of her career as to the experiences that would influence her work and literary voice.
Rhys was a writer in her elderly years, still suffering her demons, who rediscovered her creative flair and, with the help of people who cared for her, was able to produce her best work.
-Kenneth Diamond on Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work
5. A Tale of More than Two Cities
A consistent omission in biographies of Jean Rhys seems to be a sense of place. Indeed as much as she was influenced and to a degree her career made by the people she knew and shared her life with, Jean Rhys’ unique life and literary voice was highly influenced by her place in the world. Her place in the world, as it would turn out, was nowhere. More so than many people of her era Jean Rhys traveled to and was influenced by a vast array of places. Those biographies that include this aspect of her life create a significantly richer depiction of her person. A discovery from the digital humanities in this project was that by placing someone’s life on a map, in the context of where they lived and went, we can understand an entirely new dimension to their biography.
she was a person who tried to discover where she belonged since she did not feel she belonged anywhere
-Laura Karpytė in her QGIS Analysis
6. Facebook: Not All Bad
Part of the nature of a collaborative academic effort in the digital humanities is spending a lot of time working collaboratively while all individually behind computer screens at separate locations. The need for communication is obvious. With competing modes of communication between individual group members abounding the de facto solution for a unified mode of communication for all of us, came an unlikely source.
One of the things that made collaborative work easier was using a Facebook group for communication. It’s quite amazing how active our Facebook group was over the last few weeks.
-Laura Karpytė in her Blog Post
7. WordPress: Not All Bad?
Another part of the nature of academic endeavor in the digital humanities is technical difficulties. We have a consensus that WordPress was the best platform for our purposes, but not without issues. The group all consider themselves quite digitally literate so the nature of petty difficulties that arose working with WordPress was mind boggling, which included everything from the seemingly conspiratorial non-cooperation of Gravatar, to hacking esoteric plugins into our site to make Twitter and Zotero play nice. Still this was a learning experience, and we’re all satisfied with what we managed to create even if it was hard won.
Being a user of WordPress, I thought this would be fairly easy to set up.
-The naivety of Rebecca Dickson in her Blog Post
8. The Subject: An Unreliable Source?
In analyzing multiple biographies comparatively, a general leaning was that the ‘better’ biographies had a greater focus on the humanity of the Jean Rhys. However as it would also shake out the Subject‘s own perspective, it does not necessarily add to the effectiveness or even necessarily the reliability of one account of their life. While most biographies attempt to take the subject’s perspective by analyzing what they had to say after the fact, posthumously even, others have the benefit of first hand access. The contemporaneous biography by Louis James and Jean Rhys’ unfinished biography were found respectively to be lacking as a biography in the case of the former, and potentially biased in the case of the latter.
Examples like this as a result may bear the question of whether Rhys is trying to build a sympathetic picture of herself
-Rebecca Dickson on Jean Rhys’ Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
9. Subjectivity vs Objectivity
One of the criticisms leveled against Lillian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour and biographies taking a similar humanizing approach to the Outsider is their subjectivity. Indeed a recurring theme in the study is the effectiveness of a subjective approach compared to an objective one. Many of the criticisms our team has leveled against other biographies, in particular Angier’s, involve rigorous scientific objectivity being clinical to the point of not creating a relatable or worthwhile picture of Rhys’ life. It seems like disagreements on the role of objectivity in biography is telling of a wider debate on what constitutes a good biography, what it should be and who it should be for.
Pizzichini’s biography is much more subjective and she sacrifices academic style for the sake of easier readability which may appeal to a larger number of readers. Thus, it is clear that her aims and target audience differ from Howells’.
-Laura Karyptė on Carol Anne Howell’s Jean Rhys
10. On the Shoulders of Giants
In a consensus of both the utility of digital humanities to the future of literary criticism and the humanities in general, we are in no doubt that there is nothing special about our application of technology to this project. While the methodology we employ is innovative, currently the expectation is that this is the early developments of what should and will eventually be common best practice for literary criticism. However unlike the a priori nature of literary criticism up until now, we are only able to employ this methodology by the grace of those innovators who are building and maintaining the tools we use and those educators propagating these practices in Academia. The improvement and expansion of digital humanities methodologies is a collaborative effort not just between teams like ours but the entire academic community.
Dr Lang is the course organiser for our Digital Humanities class at Edinburgh University. Her knowledge, guidance, patience and enthusiasm towards this project was indispensable for everybody involved.
-Acknowledgments on our Team Profiles Page